The game of paintball is one in which two or more "military" teams try to capture one another's flags. The players on the teams each carry a compressed gas-powered gun that shoots paintballs--gelatin or plastic spherical capsules which contain a colored liquid. When a player is hit with a paintball from an adversary's gun, the paintball ruptures and leaves a colored "splat" on the hit player who is then "out" and must leave the game.
As the game of paintball has grown in sophistication, semiautomatic paintball guns--guns that sequentially fire individual paintballs as fast as the trigger can be repeatedly pulled--have become more prevalent. The high firing rate capability of semiautomatic paintball guns has necessitated the use of bulk loader devices in conjunction with such guns.
A hopper feeder is normally adapted to internally store a relatively large quantity of paintballs (for example 100-200 paintballs) and has a bottom outlet opening through which the stored paintballs can sequentially drop. Connected to the housing over its bottom outlet opening, and extending downwardly therefrom, is a feed tube that is connectable to the gun's hollow infeed.
During normal operation of the loader, paintballs dropped through its housing outlet opening form a paintball stack, within the feed tube and gun infeed, that is fed to the gun during firing. Paintball jams intermittently occur within the hopper-housing during firing of the gun. These jams prevent the normal delivery of paintballs downwardly through the housing outlet opening, with the result that the paintball stack can be totally depleted by several shots of the gun.
In the past, clearing of such jams has required that the gun be forcibly shaken to dislodge the paintballs causing the jam within the loader housing. Such a solution is undesirable since it interrupts the proper aiming of the paintball gun and, of course, correspondingly interrupts the gun user's ability to continue the rapid firing of the gun.